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STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS. 
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, COPVT?fOHT ENTRV 

fcLASS'^XXe No. 




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COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN 
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Published June ^ igo2 



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GOLF 

THEEE new things have come 
into our American Hfe in re- 
cent years. All three have seemed 
to come suddenly, but all three have 
affected very notably the daily walk 
and conversation of such Americans 
as one ordinarily has in mind when 
one says " we '' or " us/' One of 
them, perhaps two, will sooner or 
later take hold also of that larger 
body of Americans which is not 
supposed to have much of thought 
or feeling in common with " us." 
As yet, however, the new impulses 
do not seem to have quivered 



2 Golf 

through the Siamese bond of flesh 
which ties us to our other half. 

But bring together anywhere a 
company of reasonably alert and 
reasonably well-to-do Americans, 
and the chances are their talk will 
shortly concern itself with one of 
three subjects which ten years 
ago would have gone unmentioned. 
They will talk of money, perhaps 
— but not as the Americans of 
Dickens's time talked of money. 
Money considered as an object of 
individual aspiration they will with 
one accord decry and deprecate ; 
even trade will be euphemized into 
a career. It is money as a social 
and economic force, money massed 
in billions and warring with other 



Golf 3 

billions, which they will permit 
themselves to discuss.. Or they will 
talk of things military and naval 
and diplomatic; of colonies and 
races, and the exhumed East, and 
England's foreboded decadence, 
and our own emergence as a world 
power. Or, — they will talk of 
golf. Empire, trusts, and golf : 
these are the new things in Ameri- 
can life. From domestic cares we 
have faced about to world-wide 
enterprises; from an extreme of 
individualism and industrial compe- 
tition we have turned to a marvel- 
ous development of cooperation 
and combination; from our pas- 
sionate absorption in work we have 
somehow passed into an equally 
passionate absorption in play. 



4 Golf 

Now, of these three new things, 
but one, the trust, is a genuinely 
American growth. For that reason, 
there seems to be little doubt that 
our industrial reorganization is for 
good and all ; at any rate, there is 
little likelihood of our going back- 
ward, even though it should transpire 
that our present stage is transitional 
merely. It is a new thing for the 
world, not for us only, and we have 
been the pioneers in it. But empire 
and golf are old, though to us they 
are new. Even with us, so rapidly 
do we exhaust a subject, their first 
newness is already worn off. Ac- 
cordingly, one hears it said that 
they will go as they came ; that wae 
acquired them both imitatively, and 



Golf 6 

not because of any real liking for 
them. The one is by many thought 
to be inconsistent with all our past, 
and contrary to the very genius 
of our political life; the other, ill 
suited to our climate and to our 
quick and lively temper. The Su- 
preme Court set itself to answer the 
doubt about American imperialism, 
but neglected golf. Let us be judi- 
cial for ourselves. 

And in truth there is need of 
some judicial restraint, particularly 
if one has friends of two classes : of 
the class that never did play golf, 
and are proud of it; and of the class 
that began to play it, and have now 
gone back to tennis or — croquet. 
Neither class is numerically impor- 



6 Golf 

tant, but both contrive to be exceed- 
ingly disagreeable at times. Of the 
two, the class that has given up 
golf is the more depressing to one 
who has not given it up and has no 
mind to, but is himself conscious at 
times that the pleasure it yields 
him is by so much lessened as it is 
now fathomed and measured, and 
no longer, as it was for a time, a 
delightful expectancy. To have 
found completely one's own limita- 
tions as a golfer is to have found a 
limitation in golf itself; and that is 
one of the analogies to life in which 
the game abounds. This, however, 
is a very different thing from that 
complete reaction from a spent en- 
thusiasm which they who have 



Qolf 7 

abandoned golf are afflicted with 
and afflict their more steadfast 
friends with. I speak not now — 
and perhaps I ought not ever to 
speak, for I should never speak 
within bounds — of such as not 
merely began to play golf , but kept 
on playing it, from no enthusiasm 
whatever, but only because it was 
the fashion. Kept on, I say; for 
none of us but is frail enough to do 
things now and then because they 
are the fashion. But the man who 
has actually learned to play, and 
played, and had still no other mind 
in playing than to be in the fashion 
and occupied according to the mode, 
and never once found himself play- 
ing for playing's sake, — that man 



8 Qolf 

should be a butler, a hired mourner 
at funerals. His point of view is 
like the attendant's at a Turkish 
bath, who protested, in the way of 
business, that he was always mighty 
particular about " his " hands, — 
meaning the hands of his patrons. 

J^o, I mean the men who have 
played golf because they liked it, and 
some of them even played it well, 
and who play it now no more, or 
rarely. They are few, but they 
put us under a necessity, before we 
predict for golf a permanently im- 
portant place among our sports, to 
compare its vogue here with that of 
other imported games, — with that 
of tennis, for example, and with the 
sporadic popularity of cricket. 



Golf 9 

The beginnings of American lawn 
tennis are not so far away but that 
one can recall the time when to 
board a public conveyance or walk 
along a crowded thoroughfare with 
a racket in one's hand was to draw 
upon one's self the same curious 
glances, and perhaps the saipe irrev- 
erent remarks from street urchins, 
which a caddie bag will still some- 
times provoke. It cannot be more 
than twelve years since I found the 
youth of a country town east of the 
Mississippi in heated debate over 
the question whether flannels or 
knickerbockers were the proper 
"uniform" for their tennis club. 
Tennis, however, was firmly estab- 
lished as an American sport before 



10 Golf 

golf came,.and it has swiftly emerged 
from the eclipse it then passed into, 
English cracks have striven in vain 
for our American championship, 
and picked Enghsh teams have been 
beaten in two series of contests 
for an international trophy. Good 
judges, in fact, incline to the opinion 
that quite recently the game has 
progressed faster on this side than 
on the other, and^that our best men 
are now fully the equals of the best 
over there. Cricket, on the other 
hand, is clearly unable to make its 
way here. Save among people of 
English or Canadian birth, or in 
communities proverbially free from 
haste, it does not flourish and never 
will. Schoolboys do not take it up 



Golf 11 

of their own motion. The history 
of the two sports would seem to 
show that no considerable body of 
Americans are likely to pursue, for 
the mere purpose of imitation, a 
sport in which they neither attain 
excellence nor find a genuine and 
unstrained pleasure. That is all 
tennis and cricket have to tell us of 
the future of golf in America. 

The history of golf in England 
does not help us, for in the matter 
of its foreign origin and the imita- 
tive character of its beginnings our 
English cousins are in much the 
same case with us. Until well into 
the eighties, golf among sports had 
no higher standing south of the 
Tweed than oatmeal had in Dr. 



12 Golf 

Johnson's time among foods. The 
advisability of giving it space in the 
Badminton books in 1890 was seri- 
ously questioned, and Mr. Horace 
Hutchinson is authority for the 
statement that its earliest vogue was 
in no small measure attributable to 
the circumstance of Mr. Balfour's 
prominence in public life, and the 
undue attention which was drawn 
to his two extraordinary diversions 
of golf and theology. When clubs 
began to be formed, professional 
teachers were imported from Scot- 
land, and for years the open cham- 
pionship seemed to Englishmen as 
remote and unattainable a height 
as our own open championship still 
seems to native Americans. The 



Golf 13 

victory, in 1890, of Mr. John Ball, 
Jr., Englishman and amateur, was 
so great a surprise that Scotchmen 
refused to take it for anything but 
an accident. Taylor, an English 
professional, won in 1893, and his 
caddie, now a well-known profes- 
sional in this country, tells with 
glee a story of the victor's success- 
ful encounter, conducted under the 
rules of a good old English sport, 
more popular in the eighteenth cen- 
tury than in this, with several as- 
tounded and irate Scotchmen who 
awaited him on the eighteenth green. 
For England, as for America, St. 
Andrews is still the source of golf- 
ing law and precedent. There, as 
here, it is impossible to forecast 



14 Golf 

the future of the game from any 
adequate test of time. But it should 
be added that the Enghsh do not 
suspect themselves of such incon- 
stancy to any sport they have once 
found good as they who predict the 
decline of golf here must suppose 
us capable of. 

Its persistence here depends on 
the answers to two questions : Can 
we play it well ? Do we genuinely 
like it ? Individually, some of us 
may find the two questions merging 
into one, and if golf were like other 
games a negative answer to the first 
would imply the same for the other. 
Each of us, on finding he could 
play something else better, would 
promptly relinquish golf. And col- 



Golf 16 

lectively we are of such a temper 
that it is hard to conceive of our 
playing year after year a game 
which, whether because we play it 
in America or because we are 
Americans, we never could learn 
to play so well as other peoples. 
We set too much store by excel- 
lence, as well as success, for that. 

But the first question must not 
be answered in the negative. Mr. 
Travis, a stranger to the game until 
he was nearing thirty, self-taught, 
has made himself the equal of ama- 
teurs trained from childhood on the 
best courses and in the best tradi- 
tions of Scotland, and even of pro- 
fessionals but little below the first 
rank. The meetings of the national 



16 Golf 

association last autumn, at Atlantic 
City and at Baltusrol, showed such 
an improvement within the year 
of the standard of play both for 
women and for men as none of us 
had expected. The prominence of 
players still in their teens, at these 
and other important meetings of 
the season, was particularly notable. 
As yet, there has been no such op- 
portunity as in tennis to compare a 
group of our best players with men 
like Mr. Hilton and Mr. Ball and 
the lamented Tait, and Mr. Travis's 
tour of the English and Scottish 
courses was hardly a fair test of his 
prowess ; for he was playing too 
constantly, and nowhere near the 
top of his form. Competent ob- 



Golf 17 

servers tell us that the standard of 
amateur play is still appreciably 
higher on the other side, and it 
is probably true that in golf, as 
in rowing, the very highest skill 
will rarely be attained through any 
course of training that begins after 
childhood. Nevertheless, there is 
every reason to believe that the 
generation now in school and col- 
lege will have representatives on 
the links, say ten years from the 
present time, quite as competent to 
defend our championship from in- 
vading Britons as their fellows are 
already proving themselves on the 
tennis courts. Florida and Califor- 
nia compensate us somewhat for the 
milder winters and summers and the 



18 Qolf 

m 

longer twilights of the British Isles, 
though none of our soils presents 
the firm, velvety turf, and none of 
our chmates permits the freedom 
with decanters, which the Britons 
enjoy. That the effect of our cli- 
mate, or of anything else peculiarly 
American, upon our muscles and 
nerves, unfits us for good play, is 
scarcely believable by any one who 
from experience knows the value 
in golf of that very American dash 
and verve and disposition to play 
better than one knows how which 
so markedly differentiates our ten- 
nis from theirs. In match play, at 
least, whatever may be said of medal 
play, and however little a mere ob- 
server may suspect it, cold-blooded- 



Golf 19 

ness is quite as apt to prove a weak- 
ness as a safeguard. We need to 
master our ardors, not to quench 
them. 

There is but one reasonable source 
of uneasiness. Our tennis cracks 
have shown a tendency to retire 
earlier in life than is the wont of 
English players, and should our 
golfers do likewise the standard of 
play will be affected more than in 
tennis ; for golfers do not reach 
their prime so soon as tennis play- 
ers, or begin so soon to decline. 
Youth is not nearly so essential to 
excellence in golf as in most other 
sports. The best of the profes- 
sionals are over thirty. 

On that score, however, the his- 



20 . Golf 

tory of American golf, brief as it 
is, and particularly of its first be- 
ginnings, is reassuring. It was not 
the schoolboys, nor yet the college 
athletes, who introduced it among 
us, as they did tennis and football. 
On the contrary, college professors 
were playing it before the first 
student team was formed, and long 
before Yale, Harvard or Princeton 
gave it a place in the lengthening 
list of their competitions. In fact, 
it got its first chance in America 
because it seemed to be a game 
which men no longer young might 
hope to play with a measure of skill. 
Affected, therefore, by grown-up 
people of leisure, it was at once 
associated with wealth and with 



Golf 21 

" society '' as it has not been abroad, 
where it has not been considered 
distinctively a rich man's game. If 
it had broken out among the school- 
boys instead of their fathers, prob- 
ably our clubhouses would have 
been comparatively unimportant ap- 
purtenances of the links, as in Scot- 
land ; but in this respect the rise 
of country clubs and the general 
awakening to the pleasures of the 
country also had their effect. Even 
in America, however, the game has 
now a far wider popularity than it 
could have so long as wealth was 
necessary to the enjoyment of it. 
Many large cities have their public 
links ; towns and small cities have 
their nine-hole courses ; there are 



22 Golf 

hundreds of clubs whose dues are 
within the reach of all but the 
slenderest purses. In the metro- 
politan districts, one is apt to find 
that the clubs whose representatives 
figure the most creditably in open 
competitions are content with un- 
pretentious clubhouses, and devote 
their income chiefly to the up-keep 
of their courses. Wherever golf 
is played for its own sake, the feel- 
ing against extravagance, and par* 
ticularly against anything like dis- 
play in dress, is apt to be strong. 
The man in the ornate cardigan 
jacket, with the silver-mounted cad- 
die bag, is not dreaded on the links, 
nor does his splendor arouse any 
envy on the clubhouse piazza. We 



Golf 23 

seem to be rid of the people who 
thought they found in golf a new 
sartorial opportunity. 

These departed to other costumes 
and poses, and with them all who 
never got beyond a mimetic delight 
in golf, and the few also who took 
their golf aright, but not deep 
enough: there abide on the links a 
host of players whom the peculiar 
merits of the game, now no longer 
heightened by the charm of novelty 
or subtly commended by the fash- 
ion, continue to attract and hold. 

Its merits, its points of supe- 
riority to baseball, tennis, cricket, 
and other of the infinite number of 
games built up from the simple pri- 
mary exercise of hitting a ball with 



24 Golf 

a club, are to be sought in two di- 
rections. There are the demands 
it makes upon its votaries, and the 
compensations it renders them in 
return. True, the only way to en- 
joy golf is to play it, — except, per- 
haps, to rest after, and talk of it. 
ISTevertheless, the play is not play ' 
alone, but work and play, give and 
receive, object and subject, achieve- 
ment and contemplation, as no other 
playing but life itself is. Let me see 
if I cannot make plain what I mean, 
and why golfers do actually find 
golf, qua game, not merely superior 
to all other games, but different 
from them all in a kind and degree 
of difference quite unlike their dif- 
ferences from each other. 



Golf 25 

The differences most susceptible 
of enumeration and analysis are in 
the matter of the demands it makes. 
From the variety of the situations 
it presents, there arises a constant 
demand upon the player's intelli- 
gence ; from the unequaled impor- 
tance of delicate adjustments, and 
the heavy penalties imposed upon 
very slight errors, there arises a 
constant demand upon his self-con- 
trol ; and it makes a quite peculiar 
demand upon his conscience by rea- 
son of the clearness with which its 
standard of excellence is defined. 

True, there is a point of view 
from which it may be regarded as 
an extremely simple game, — the 
very simplest of all the games with 



as Oolf 

a ball and a club. The player's 
object is simple and single to the 
point of simple-mindedness and 
singularity^ one might say : to put 
a small ball in a small hole with the 
fewest possible strokes. But so are 
the objects of the highest ambitions, 
the guiding stars of careers the 
most perplexed and devious. It is 
true, likewise, that all the countless 
strokes a golfer makes are resolvable 
into three kinds of stroke, — driv- 
ing, approaching, and putting. But 
Mr. Everard, in a dictum unsur- 
passed for truth and brilliancy by 
any in all the extremely clever liter- 
ature of golf, has declared that to 
make those three strokes aright one 
must have " art, science, and inspi- 



Golf 27 

ration." From the moment the ball 
leaves the tee, whether it be topped, 
pulled, or sliced, or whether, struck 
in proper fashion a trifle below the 
medial line, and urged forward with 
an exquisite, free lashing out of the 
wrists, it take flight as with wings, 
and seek its true course as with a 
mind and purpose of its own, until 
it drop into the cup with a tintin- 
nabulation that no louder clang or 
paean ever surpassed in its sugges- 
tion of victory and consummation, 
there is no foreseeing what per- 
plexity or temptation to careless- 
ness or overconfidence it will pre- 
sent. Not twice, off the tee ground 
and the putting green, will the pos- 
sibilities and probabilities of the 



28 Golf 

stroke be quite the same. In the 
lie, the wind, the distance to be 
traversed, the obstacles to be car- 
ried, there are variations not to be 
reckoned by any known mathe- 
matics. The state and prospects 
of the match, the situation in refer- 
ence to the hole, — as, for instance, 
whether one is playing the odd, or 
the like, or perhaps the comfortable 
and beguiling one off two, — and 
the measure of one's superiority or 
inferiority to one's opponent, and 
one's own state of self-command 
and confidence, or rage, or blank 
despondency, must all help to de- 
termine how that particular stroke 
shall be played. For into each 
stroke there must go not merely the 



Golf 29 

thought of the stroke itself, and all 
its parts, and of all the material 
conditions of it, but the thought of 
one's self and of one's adversary. 
If the match be a foursome, one's 
responsibilities are not halved, but 
doubled. If a mixed foursome, they 
are multiplied by as many fold as 
the thought of one's partner out- 
weighs all thought of self. TJieUy 
as the match approaches its dread- 
fully quiet climax of defeat or vic- 
tory, the responsibility may grow 
positively appalling. The very de- 
liberation which, impossible in most 
games, is characteristic of this, so 
far from lessening the strain on one's 
nerves, undoubtedly heightens it. 
One has time to estimate the emer- 



30 Golf 

gency, to realize the crisis. Not 
the fiercest rally at tennis, not the 
longest and timeliest home run at 
baseball, not the most heroic rush at 
football, requires a more rigid con- 
centration of thought and energy, 
or more of the lover's courage, than 
the flick of the putter that sends 
the ball crawling on its last little 
journey across the putting green, 
when the putt is for the hole and 
the hole means the match. There 
is not a quality of mind or body, — 
I will not except or qualify at all, 
— no, not one, that hf e itself proves 
excellent, which a circuit of the 
hnks will not test. 

The like is true of those moral 
qualities which all games more or 



Golf 31 

less shrewdly test. In f alrness, for 
example, there is no such discipline 
in any other game, because no other 
game offers so constantly or so 
devilishly the temptation to be un- 
fair. The rules are many and easy 
to misinterpret, and in ordinary 
matches, when there are no on- 
lookers, the player is often at lib- 
erty to give himself the benefit of 
the doubt. To alter the lie for the 
better, to ground one's club in a 
hazard, to miscount one's strokes, 
— these are the ranker and grosser 
offenses, which only the self-ad- 
mitted cad is in danger of commit- 
ting. The lesser sins, for better 
men, are countless. I^ot infre- 
quently, to state the case to your 



32 Golf 

opponent is merely to let him give 
you the benefit of the doubt, which 
your own conscience tells you should 
go to him. Cheating is so difficult 
to prove, and bringing the detected 
culprit to book is so thankless a 
task, that he will oftenest go un- 
punished, until, if he do not mend 
his ways, he is somehow gradually 
made aware that he is fallen into 
disfavor with his fellows. Indeed, 
for this very reason, it is hard to 
see how any but honest players have 
any pleasure in the game; for the 
dishonest cannot win even that low 
conceit of superior cleverness which 
they do seem to get from sharp 
practices at other games, as in busi- 
ness. The Hghter virtues of good 



Golf 33 

temper, patience, and courtesy are 
scarcely less essential than the 
sterner. Without them it is hard 
to play well, and impossible to play 
with enjoyment. 

But there is yet another way in 
which golf tries a man's moral 
strength ; and this is the respect 
in which the analogy of the game 
to life is most remarkable, — in 
which it is nothing less than pro- 
found. There is fixed, for every 
links, with an accuracy and precise- 
ness possible in no other game I 
know of, a standard of good play. 
I mean the Bogey score. There is 
no such standard in tennis, baseball, 
cricket: in these, one can measure 
the excellence of one's own play, 



u Golf 

and estimate one's progress or de- 
cline, but vaguely, or against a par- 
ticular opponent's, which is as vari- 
able as one's own. In golf, one can 
play alone against Bogey, and even 
in matches one has the Bogey score, 
and record scores, and one's own 
former scores, in mind. Striving 
to do better than one's opponent is 
common to all games; striving to 
do well without regard to one's op- 
ponent, and with a perfectly clear 
understanding of what is good, bad, 
and indifferent, is quite another 
thing. The duffer, making his pa- 
tient, solitary round, outlawed by 
the rules, a mark for the ridicule 
of clever writers, stands, neverthe- 
less, for that in golf which no other 



Golf 35 

game can boast, - — a clear though 
to him unattainable ideal. 

But the thing is deeper than that. 
The Bogey score for the whole 
course, if that were all, would be 
like those very noble, but not practi- 
cal or intimate, broad plans of life 
which high-minded youth sets up 
for the stress of manhood and the 
failing powers of age. It would 
not with sufficient urgency make 
itself a part of every specific effort. 
Bogey, however, like an actual op- 
ponent, competes with us for every 
hole; at each, with perfect justice, 
he declines to profit by good luck. 
He will not count it if he hole his 
approach; he never lucks a putt. 
But neither does his approach over- 



36 Golf 

run, and .his second putt always 
goes down. There is a standard 
of excellence for specific tasks. 
ISTay — more : with every single 
stroke we assail an ideal. There is 
no taking refuge in a breath-saving 
lob, as in tennis. Wherever and 
however the ball may lie, there is a 
certain right way to play it, a cer- 
tain reasonable hope in the stroke, 
from which we may be tempted by 
overconfidence and an adventurous 
trust in luck, or frightened by too 
low an estimate of our own powers. 
The ideal of golf, the moral law of 
golf, is thus, throughout, the ideal 
and the moral law of life : similarly 
persistent, silent, inescapable. A 
golfer's mistakes, his individual mis- 



Golf 37 

judgments^ slices, pulls, foozles, are 
sins, — nothing less ; he will writhe 
under them ere he sleeps. 

True, of each according to his 
strength it is demanded. There is, 
of course, one's handicap. But the 
consolation of a handicap is pre- 
cisely such as it yields in the greater 
game, and no more. In both alike, 
to be quite consoled with it is des- 
picable; to refuse altogether to be 
consoled with it is to reject philo- 
sophy; to strive on, either des- 
perately or sweetly, to the end of 
doing without it, to the attainment 
of a positive, non-relative excel- 
lence, is the right virtue and hero- 
ism. The principle of the handicap 
is always an admirable one, and it 



38 Golf 

is illustrajted in golf as in no other 
game; for in no other^ probably, 
does one's play so vary from day to 
day, in no other is there such need 
of patience under discouragement 
or of restraint in good fortune. To 
aim at a high average of perform- 
ance, and not to be overmindful 
either of temporary fallings off or 
streaks of brilliancy, is the principle 
turned into rule. Does life enforce 
another so wise, so practical, or so 
fine? 

If it does, then it is the rule of 
self-study, and that, too, is a rule 
of golf, commended by like rewards, 
enforced by penalties as logical and 
as sure. This is the demand of golf 
that is oftenest discussed in the 



Golf 39 

treatises, and set forth with the 
greatest fullness of illustration and 
analysis. But the true nature of it, 
the extent and limit of it, the little 
more and the little less of it, is best 
made plain, I fancy, only by per- 
sisting with this same analogy to 
life which already, no doubt, is 
growing tiresome. For the line be- 
tween the self-study which is need- 
ful and the self-consciousness which 
is fatal is precisely the same in 
both. You discover, let us say, that 
the position of your left foot in 
driving is wrong, and by practice 
ascertain that you should set it thus, 
and not so. ]N^othing, surely, can 
be simpler; you will thenceforth 
avoid the error, and slice or pull no 



40 Golf 

more. But it is not merely neces- 
sary to place that left foot properly : 
it is necessary to leave it there, to 
withdraw your mind from it, to re- 
distribute your attention, or will, or 
whatever may be the right term, 
throughout all the parts of your 
anatomy. A hang, a catch, a snap 
o' the lid, and you are snared. That 
left foot will not down. At every 
stroke it will offend you. It is no 
longer yours, but is become a for- 
eign and an alien thing. It rises 
up and kicks you. It shall be set 
upon your neck. Eebellion and civil 
war is let loose within your state. 
Conquer it you may, but you know 
not when it will grow again out- 
rageous. You are cursed with a 



Golf 41 

besetting sin, and in the time of 
stress it will find you out. Hence- 
forth, only by a constant watching 
and willing can you doubtfully main- 
tain your poise between the outward 
and the inward thought, and pre- 
cariously regain the wholeness you 
have lost. 

" Wholeness '^ is the word. Try 
it, if it do not best express your 
achievement, physical and psycho- 
logical, the thing and the sense of 
it, when you have made a stroke 
aright. Or try it, even, with the 
dream, the maddening vision of the 
stroke, which will surely visit you, 
though the thing itself you never 
once attain. To take apart, and 
then to put together again, — " all 



42 Golf 

the king's horses and all the king's 
men" will not help you with the 
task. Envisage it however you 
may, consult about it with whomso- 
ever you choose, it will baffle you 
still with its mystery of many in 
one, until once, and by a single, 
clear, heroic effort of your will, 
you do achieve it, and then your 
business is at every stroke to recall 
and repeat that effort, clear and 
single, as before, until by repetition 
it shall grow both f amihar and easy, 
until each member and nerve shall 
sweetlier and sweetlier obey upon 
the instant and range harmonious 
at your call. That is golf, or I am 
not an honest duffer. It is life, or 
I have never summoned forth the 



Golf 43 

turbulent, dismembered host of mine 
own powers, and strained them out 
to the great compass of a deed. 
Ponder it : a cosmology unfolds. 

But this is growing a trifle seri- 
ous. Our friend who has never 
played golf is getting disgusted 
again. Our other friend who has 
given over playing is blankly mys- 
tified. Even among us, the faithful, 
there be some disquieted. Let us 
face about, ere we amplify too much 
the active principle, the demands, 
of golf, and regain our composure 
with the thought of what it gives 
us. Nevertheless, what it asks is 
oftener than what it gives the se- 
cret of its hold on us, as giving is 
oftener than receiving the secret of 
any love. 



44 Oolf 

The mere bodily delights of it are 
not to be hastened over when we 
take account of its compensations. 
If it be true, as many will no doubt 
incline to think, that the best cri- 
terion of any exercise is the number 
of one's bodily parts which it in- 
volves, then it would be hard to find 
any superior to the full St. Andrews 
swing. I know nothing comparable 
to it for bringing one acquainted 
with one's body, for the reassuring 
sense it gives of power and vitality. 
Swimming is perhaps likest it in 
that respect. Rowing is less free. 
Tennis neglects an arm and a side. 
Baseball and football distribute the 
exertion less equally. None of these 
permit the deliberation essential to 



Golf 45 

a full realization and enjoyment of 
one's energy. In no other exercise 
which is also sport are grace and 
dignity so constantly possible as in 
golf; and in none is the repetition 
of the movement less apt to grow 
wearing and monotonous. 

The sense of effectiveness, of 
competence, in a proper stroke, is 
also, to my mind, unparalleled. A 
great and complicated activity is 
centred upon an object exceptionally 
definite. Force, gathered from all 
one's sources, tempered and re- 
strained with all one's balance, 
ordered and directed with one's ut- 
most of precision, poured out, as it 
were, through one's arms and hands 
and finger tips, projected along the 



46 Golf 

slender shaft into the head of the 
club, and lovingly imparted to the 
ball, is on the instant, and before 
one's eyes, transmuted into a form 
of motion unrivaled for its hkeness 
to animation. It is creative work. 
One breathes the breath of hf e into 
the thing. One begets and fathers. 
Even when one fails, there is always 
the sense of power misdirected, the 
leaping conception of the next 
stroke, which shall make amends. 
Mr. Arnold Haultain, who by com- 
mon consent is entitled to the dis- 
tinction of having come the nearest 
to putting it all into words, and so 
written the Recessional of golf's 
jubilee, places a due emphasis on 
that persistency of the golfer's hope. 



Golf 47 

The unconquerable in ns is nohow 
else so incomprehensibly manifest 
in the little. 

The pleasing sense of one's own 
physical parts is paralleled by the 
feeling for and of the implements 
of the play. The love of the golfer 
for his favorite clubs passes the 
love of the cricketer or the baseball 
player for his bat, of the tennis 
player for his racket; the hunts- 
man's feeling for his gun approaches 
it more nearly. JSTow, the inanimate 
things we take in our hands are by 
no means insignificant among the 
inducements of our moods. To be 
well fitted in our clothes and our 
canes, to be sweetly affected by 
whatever object we are brought in 



48 aoif 

physical contact with, is important 
beyond our ordinary estimate of 
such " accidentals." The furniture 
of our rooms is very really the fur- 
niture of our minds, and our rai- 
ment does not clothe our backs 
alone. The golfer's clubs are often 
a delight quite apart from their uses 
in the game, l^ot one of us but has 
spent hours in mere idle addressing 
and wigwagging and swinging — 
often, perhaps, at some expense of 
glassware — with a driver whose 
several qualities of weight and bal- 
ance and " whippiness " have been 
rightly adjusted to the physical per- 
sonality of its master. For indul- 
gence in such a gustation of one's 
clubs, rooms void of chandeliers are 



Golf 49 

to be recommended. Mine were 
once fitted with electrical bulbs; 
they burst with a rather startling 
pop, and my recollection is, they 
cost fifty cents apiece. 

If, in respect of the sense it gives 
of one's body and of one's clubs, 
golf is at least the equal of other 
sports, it is, I think, clearly the 
superior of any other I know in the 
matter of the relation into which it 
brings one with one's fellow player, 
whether as partner or as opponent. 
A principal distinction is that there 
is no direct opposition of force to 
force or of skill to skill in the rivalry 
it involves. Save the stymie, there 
is no occasion when another's play 
can affect one's own otherwise than 



60 Golf 

morally. Your opponent is never 
guilty of your cuppy lies ; you are 
never irritated by a direct antago- 
nisnij or humiliated by the necessity 
of yielding to greater physical 
strength^ or tempted to a mean 
exaltation. It is all of the quality 
of well-bred argumentation over an 
impersonal theme. Moreover, the 
longish intervals between the strokes 
permit, or rather demand, conver- 
sation, which is so seldom possible 
in games, and the play itself, like a 
lawyer's brief, is an unfailing con- 
versational resource. The strokes, 
on the other hand, like the puffs of 
a smoker, Hke a woman's crochet- 
ing, are capital pause-makers. The 
opportunities for courteous inter- 



Golf 51 

changes, for the shading of compli- 
ments and condolences, are many 
and constant. The very pace one 
falls into is conducive to compan- 
ionship. It is certainly easier to 
talk with one's competitor on the 
links than with one's companion 
when one walks for walking's and 
talking's sake. I am inclined, in 
fact, to set a match at golf above 
any other known method of begin- 
ning an acquaintance. True, there 
are always the byes after the match 
is lost, or the difficult fifty yards 
from the last hole, where the putt 
went wrong, to the clubhouse ; but 
one has usually a chance, brisk from 
one's tub, and restored to good- 
humor, to redeem one's self, and 



52 Golf 

win the best part of any match, 
with a jest or a confession or an 
appreciation, over the Scotch or the 
tea. The number of such acquaint- 
ances that ripen into good-fellow- 
ship and friendliness, or even into 
friendship, must be very great. 
One of our veterans tells me that 
the very best thing he wins are not 
the cups and medals, but friends. 
If what I have said is true of the 
thoroughness with which golf tests 
character, the connection between 
that demand of it and this compen- 
sation needs no elaboration. 

After all, however, golf is most 
rightly considered as one method 
of returning to nature, and the 
most reasonable criterion of golf as 



Golf 53 

recreation is the mood and attitude 
in which it brings one in touch with 
nature. Probably the great major- 
ity of its votaries find in a fresh 
concern about nature the principal 
constant effect of it in themselves. 
Though we must concede it ac- 
cidental^ the requirements of the 
game are ordinarily very much at 
one with the demands of good taste 
and an artistic sense in the matter 
of the choice and laying out of a 
course. IS^o doubt, courses have 
often been chosen merely for the 
reason that they were beautiful ; 
but it is true likewise that in any 
given region the most attractive 
square mile or more is very apt to 
prove the best for a links. Every 



64 Golf 

good links must have firm green 
tm^f underfoot ; it must have vistas ; 
it is better for swells and undula- 
tions; variety is essential. In but 
one respect^ and there only super- 
ficially, is the artistic sense antago- 
nized; trees are banned from the 
fair green. They are the worst haz- 
ards conceivable, because the most 
illogical and unjust. The loss, how- 
ever, is hardly real. Proverbially, 
the greatest hindrance to the enjoy- 
ment of trees is other trees. The 
last place in the world to go to find 
trees beautiful is into the heart of 
the densest wood. Better even this 
Texas prairie, where I happen to be 
writing now, treeless, and bare as 
yet of its richly embroidered mantle 



Golf 55 

of spring wild flowers, — where 
people remember their childhood 
homes in Eastern states most ten- 
derly as tree-clad places, and will 
always have trees in their pictures, 
and long backward for them as for no 
other delight they have left behind. 
To see trees, one must have at least 
a clearing, and the lake-like inter- 
val of an inland course, or the shore 
margin if it be seaside links, is often 
the best point of view conceivable. 
For the finest effect of trees, whether 
they mass in walls and make a sky- 
line or stand apart, singly majestic, 
is rather architectural than domes- 
tic. Who cares for the underside 
of leaves ? A high love would no 
more invade a tree than a cloud. 



56 Golf 

Mystery is as much a part of its 
charm as silence is. It should wave 
before us^ come athwart our vision, 
menace, invite, suggest, lift up our 
thought, — all of which is its func- 
tion on the border of the course, or 
crowning the hill near the club- 
house, or sentineling the drive. If 
the reader, not yet a golfer, find 
this far-fetched and fanciful, let 
me assure him, quite seriously, that 
golf has helped the present writer 
to develop a taste for Corot. 

That, perhaps, will make it easier 
for him to bear with me while I add 
that golf may likewise awaken one 
to a sense of the beauty of wild 
flowers, and many another delicate 
loveliness in nature. I have known 



Qolf 57 

the note of a song-sparrow to arrest 
a stroke. As for the larger appeals 
which nature makes to us^ the sky- 
lines, the sunsets, the fresh green 
of the landscape in spring and 
autumn's red and leafy splendors, 
I should but hurt my cause by too 
much protesting were I to attempt 
to explain how, after years of a 
mere casement acquaintance with 
these things, of a laborious and 
creak-kneed homage, the habit of 
golf has gradually made me truly 
aware of them, and of my rights in 
them and theirs in me. It is a 
matter of moods, I suppose, and 
golf permits and induces moods 
scarcely conceivable in other ath- 
letic competitions. It permits one to 



58 Qolf 

be contemplative. One can actually 
play it dreamily. That^ in fact, is 
a mood I should recommend in driv- 
ing to any one who affects the full 
swing, if his style be naturally slow, 
and grace not clearly beyond him. 

Fairness, however, demands a 
certain qualification here, a conces- 
sion of fact. The severity and the 
frequent sudden changes common 
to most of our American climates, 
and particularly the extreme clear- 
ness of our atmo^sphere, do some- 
what lessen for us the golfer's 
peculiar privilege of a contempla- 
tive delight in nature, and prevent 
or disturb his characteristic mood. 
The tendency of these things is to 
induce an eager, high-strung, and 



Golf 59 

even feverish responsiveness rather 
than serene enjoyment. That tem- 
per, though it be, as I have said, not 
on the whole detrimental to our play 
in respect of skill, does probably 
incapacitate us at times for the 
fullest measure of the delight we 
might have in it. Even if it does, 
however, there would seem to be 
better rather than worse reason for 
us to play. Serenity and tranquilHty 
are in truth the very moods which 
Americans of the classes that play 
golf need to cultivate. To such as 
criticise the game because it is 
slow, and takes more time than 
busy, effective men can afford to 
give it, my favorite answer is that 
this is just what makes it so good a 



60 Golf 

recreation for Americans, and par- 
ticularly for the very Americans 
who, because they are so busy and 
hurried, will not take time for it, 
but prefer instead some sort of 
rapid transit through their diver- 
sions, and would have their relaxa- 
tion without relaxing, and bolt their 
nature like their luncheons. They 
are men who do not know how to 
stroll. One of my friends was of 
these, and he used to exasperate 
me greatly. Slight, high-strung, 
all nerves and energy and alertness 
to opportunity, he could not for 
the life of him move over the course 
at any fixed and deliberate pace; 
he could not, in fact, walk at all, 
but would alternate from lingering, 



Golf 61 

leashed by courtesy, at the side of 
his partner, to bounding after his 
ball. If through golf such Ameri- 
cans shall come, as my friend has, 
into the practice of a pace that is 
neither hasting nor delaying, it will 
prove not the least valuable part 
of the education of our masters. 
For I go back to the point where 
I began, to make sure of not being 
thought to jest when I was in fact 
most serious. That cruelly over- 
tasked individual, the future his- 
torian, if he should ever come to 
know our life one tithe as well as 
we do, and if he should have a 
right sense of values in civilization 
and a keen eye to the sources of 
national character, will not rate golf, 



e2 Golf 

if it survive and continue to spread 
among us^ as the least of the three 
new things which came with the end 
of the century. In his bird's eye 
view of us, he will not neglect the 
red-coated throngs which every holi- 
day emerge from our great^ throb- 
bing citieS;, any more than he will 
neglect the marks of our material 
enterprise on the surface of the con- 
tinent, and the network of our high- 
ways, or fail to pursue the fleets and 
armies invading for us the lands we 
shall peacefully or violently con- 
quer. He will note of us, as of the 
Romans and other conquerors, that 
in the very years when we took 
upon us the imperial tasks of older 
peoples we borrowed of them also 



Golf 63 

their arts and their pleasures. It 
needs but a schoolboy's reflection 
on what came of the Romans' imi- 
tative self-indulgence to make us 
thankful that from our cousins of 
England and Scotland^ our fore- 
runners in sports as in empire, 'we 
can learn so much concerning the 
right spirit in both. That we should 
continue on this continent to play 
the same manly, healthful games 
they play on the little island, pur- 
suing always in our golf, with a 
just balance between eagerness and 
sedateness, between overconfidence 
and despondency, its clear ideal of 
excellence, displaying the heroism 
of wholeness, and sweetening our 
natures with that fine, right sense 



64 Golf 

of the human and wild nature about 
us which it so subtly quickens, — 
this is no little aspiration, even be- 
side our other aspiration to the right 
spirit in those vaster occupations 
which seem to be devolving from 
Englishmen, weary of the perplex- 
ities of empire, upon us, whom at 
last it visits in its westward course. 



Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton 6r* Co* 
Cambridge i Mass., U.S. A, 



jUN2i :902 



JUN 20 1902 



1C0P> DEL. VOC/>: 
JUN. 21 1902 



